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Twelve Twenty-One Twelve

It’s one minute after midnight, and that means the “Mayan Apocalypse” has not come to pass… at least not the way people have been joking about for the last year.

See, I’ve actually heard about that Aztec Calendar all of my life and unlike Y2K, the Rapture, or Reelecting Obama this one has special significance to me.

35 years is a long time to have a specific date to look forward to. Big things like your birthday are measured differently. Generally it’s “I can’t wait till I turn 18” not “I can’t wait till October 26th 1995”

People look forward to “the next new years” with the specific date only being relevant when you get within a few weeks of it.

Only really big deals like “December 31st 1999” are thought about 10 or 20 years ahead of time.

In fact not only is this the longest time between specific date and it’s arrival, it’s also the last one that comes to mind for me.

The only other date specific things I can think of are fictional, like the year Evangelion takes place in September 2015 or the arrival of Doc Brown on October 26th 2015

So, as you can imagine with that much time until the event, I’ve looked it up a few times. Why DID they make their calender go so far into the future and then stop on such a weird date?

Well the simple answer is that they didn’t. For years I thought they were talking about a cave with every day carved into it or something, but this isn’t the case.

The calendar is a disk that can be calculated to let you know what day it is. Because of the way it’s done, it could be reliably used for several thousand years before it would have to be adjusted.

Aka right now.

Yup, it’s this weird date in the future because of a simple math algorithm that ended it here, NOT because they carved it out to say this.

The day does have significance, it was the end of the fourth age and the beginning of the filth for mankind… still a pretty big deal.

Previous ages were told to end in destruction, so people assumed they meant we would all die, but the Mayans never said these two things HAD to go together, just that the fourth age was over.

So basically, the world ended yesterday, welcome to the new world!

Think about our current Gregorian calendar. Imagine if you could be around to see it tick over from 4999 to 5000!

By that time people will be using stardates or something, but it would still be an amazing thing for us wouldn’t it? Remember when the end of the 20th century was a big deal?

So I take a moment and tip my hat to an old civilization, you may be gone but you are not forgotten and I shall celebrate the new age on your behalf.